November 20, 2026.
Northwest Zone of the City, Alex's Safe House.
Gerry stood, his hand resting gently on the door frame. The wood, thick and heavy, felt immovable, a silent promise of security. Inside the room, the faint glow of the lamp danced across the faces of his family.
His wife, Karin, slept curled up next to their eldest daughter, Rachel, who breathed with a slight, controlled hiss thanks to her medication. The youngest daughter, Constance, though momentarily awake, remained still, clutching a teddy bear—a quiet coping mechanism for the chaotic afternoon she had endured.
Outside, the city continued to groan; the sounds of distant sirens, screams, and sporadic gunfire composed the soundtrack of the collapse, though Gerry could only imagine how much worse the center of the city must be by comparison.
But inside the house, the silence was nearly oppressive, filtered by the high, thick walls, designed not to maintain privacy, but to repel the world.
Gerry sighed, a sound he barely dared to release. He had witnessed worse things in his years as a UN agent in conflict zones. He had seen civil war unleash its fury in a matter of days. But this... this was different. The speed, the nature of the enemy, and, above all, the figure of Alex, had completely thrown him off balance.
The memory of the afternoon asserted itself, bringing with it the stench of hot asphalt and burnt fuel.
It was barely three in the afternoon. Traffic in the city center had devolved into an immovable jam, a metal snake paralyzed by confusion. Gridlock, Gerry thought, his mind returning to the feeling of claustrophobia.
People were honking, screaming in frustration, but for Gerry, the noise didn't generate anger—it generated a chill. His instincts, forged in the cold sweat of the Balkans and Africa, whispered that this was no traffic jam from a soccer match or a simple accident. Panic had a distinct smell, and this smelled like a rout.
He had tried to turn, to find side routes, but it was too late. It was there, amidst the cacophony of horns and overheating engines, that he crossed paths with Alex. A young man who looked about twenty-five, driving a family sedan, with a woman and two youths inside. He didn't look like a family man, and his driving—aggressive, decisive, looking for every gap—caught Gerry's attention. Alex wasn't frustrated; he was executing a maneuver.
The tension broke when a truck, seemingly out of control, veered, crashing into a row of cars. Gerry and Alex, both on parallel paths, saw the opportunity and took it, using the fresh breach of twisted metal and smoke as an escape route. They managed to pull away, but Gerry's luck was fleeting.
Just two blocks later, a runaway SUV, possibly driven by a terrified civilian, broadsided him. The impact was violent; glass shattered, and the airbag struck him with a dull, heavy force.
As he struggled to assess his family, immobilized by the throbbing pain of the collision, he saw a figure approach the shattered driver's window. It was Alex.
"They're bleeding, but the spine looks clear. Do you have your phone? Fast!" Alex spoke quickly, with an unearned authority, but Gerry, a man accustomed to taking orders in a crisis, obeyed without question.
Alex helped him out, quickly assessed the minor injuries to Karin and his daughters, and, hearing Rachel's anxious cough, immediately asked, "Asthma? Do you have the medication?"
Alex's response, without waiting for a "yes" or "no," was to pull a perfectly sealed inhaler from his own backpack and hand it to Karin.
That act—the foresight, the calm amid the chaos, the medication for a condition he didn't know—was the first nail in the coffin of Gerry's doubt. A stranger doesn't stop in the middle of a nascent disaster. A stranger doesn't carry inhalers for unknowns.
Alex, with cold efficiency, procured a replacement vehicle for them (Gerry didn't ask how or from whom), settled them in, and became their guide, leading them to this house in the northwest.
Upon arriving at the "refuge," Gerry's doubt turned into a disturbing certainty. Alex's house was no ordinary house. It was a fortress.
As he settled his family in, Gerry performed a quick mental inventory. Perimeter walls were higher than the neighborhood codes allowed. The doors were reinforced steel, not wood. And, most strikingly, the constant, low hum he detected upon entering: self-sustaining energy.
Every unoccupied space inside the house was filled to the ceiling with dehydrated and canned food, water jerrycans, and boxes labeled with various ammunition calibers.
This wasn't preparation; this was prescience, Gerry thought with a chill.
No one, unless they were a full-time paranoid or a high-level security specialist, equipped their house for such a specific catastrophe scenario.
Alex, aware of the stares from Gerry and the other family (Madison, Alicia, Nick), didn't offer many explanations.
"I was warned about a much more aggressive pandemic than the last one," Alex said, sounding tired. "I didn't think it would be this bad, but I prepared anyway... And as for those people acting weird, they're not truly human anymore."
He continued informing them: "I'd already encountered these infected people; the army handled it, but apparently they couldn't contain it for much longer... And you see how it all ended."
Gerry remembered that conversation. Alex's words, his calm in describing the infected as "not human," contrasted with his age. It was a calmness one earned after seeing a body reanimate; not before. And Alex spoke as if he had seen it. The way Alex moved around the house, how he handled weapons, how he rationed the water from the very start... everything was the conduct of a disaster veteran.
Not much time had passed when a rescue mission was put in motion. Madison, Alicia's mother, asked Alex for help rescuing her husband, Travis, who was trapped downtown.
Survivor's guilt and a sense of debt compelled Gerry to stand up.
"I'm going with you," he told Alex.
"You don't have to," Alex replied, not looking at him, adjusting his ammo belt.
"I owe this to my family. And I owe it to you. I can handle myself in difficult situations."
And so, Alex, Gerry, and Nick departed.
The city center was already an inferno. The streets that had once been a traffic jam had turned into death traps filled with chaos from protesters fighting police repression and the military. And occasionally, they saw these infected people.
The mission was a blur of instantaneous decisions. Alex in front, guiding them through alleys, jumping barricades, and facing the growing threat with a precision that surpassed Gerry's own experience. It wasn't courage; it was knowledge—of the route and the danger.
They rescued Travis, his ex-wife, and his son, along with a family who had given them asylum. The operation was a success, though paid for with the loss of their vehicle to ensure the escape of the larger group toward the refuge.
Gerry and Alex returned on foot, then in a stolen car (a term Gerry had already accepted as "acquired"), and it was on that trip back that they ran into Tommy, his brother Joel, and Joel's wounded daughter, Sarah. Everything was too fast, too chaotic to process.
"All that madness... barely three hours passed," Gerry murmured, the astonishment still fresh. "Three hours from when I was hit until we returned with several more people."
His experience in war zones had taught him to adapt, yes, but his adaptation was a slow, methodical process that came with a psychological cost. Alex, conversely, had skipped that process entirely.
Early that afternoon, Alex was frantic: driving with strategic panic, rescuing people without hesitation. But after the first hour of real chaos, something had solidified within him.
Now, Alex acted with an implacable peace, like an actor who had rehearsed the play a thousand times. The young man Gerry had met in the gridlock had transformed into a seasoned survivor, a man who seemed to have lived through the end of the world and returned to narrate it.
That change was what worried Gerry the most. Not for his family—he knew Alex was their best chance for survival—but for Alex himself.
What kind of knowledge or trauma had converted a twenty-five-year-old into a ghost of war in less than a day? And what was the motive that forced him to leave a secure location and risk his life twice in less than eight hours?
Gerry ran a hand through his short hair, still feeling the afternoon's grit embedded in his scalp. He owed Alex, not just his family's lives, but also the opportunity to understand this new reality.
Taking one last deep breath, Gerry stepped away from the bedroom door and headed to the main living room.
The rest of the people rescued by Alex were gathered there. There were a mix of contained fear and the human need to cling to company.
On the largest sofa were Alicia, with her wide eyes filled with silent concern, and Nick, her brother, whose face was paler than normal, nervously fiddling with a lighter, his fingers seeking something to do.
At a corner table, Tommy and Joel, the rescued brothers, spoke in whispers about Sarah (Joel's daughter, wounded), who had fallen asleep in one of the bedrooms after Travis's ex-wife helped with her injuries. Their conversation was about logistics, about what they would do tomorrow—a desperate planning session based on zero real data.
And then there was Daniel, the man who had sheltered Travis when the downtown demonstrations began. He sat alone, staring intently at the window, his posture rigid, seemingly planning things.
Gerry approached the group, the floorboard creaking loudly under his foot in the tense silence.
"Still no news from Alex?" Gerry asked, addressing no one in particular.
Alicia was the first to answer. "Nothing, yet. I hope he's safe. It's been two hours since he left for downtown."
Nick flicked the lighter. "Why did he leave? Why does he risk himself for anyone, knowing what's out there?"
Joel, Sarah's father, looked up, his eyes red from exhaustion. "He left for a friend, kid. That's what we do... Besides, it seems to be in his nature; he saved us too."
"That's not it," Gerry intervened, crossing his arms. "It's not just that he left. It's how he did it. Calm. As if he was only going out for milk, not to face... whatever is out there."
Gerry let his words, raw and loaded with the anxiety he refused to externalize, hang in the air. The tense silence that followed was not one of denial, but of astonishment.
Alicia and Nick, who were huddled together on the sofa, looked at him. They weren't surprised by the comment itself, but by the sudden consciousness of a truth they had been suppressing: Gerry was right. Alex didn't behave like a terrified civilian; he didn't behave like them.
"I noticed it earlier. Yesterday afternoon, he got us out of the first downtown protests," Alicia murmured, her voice low and broken. "Today, he helped us with our infected neighbor. He acted... different. Very fast. As if he knew exactly where they would be, where it would be dangerous. I thought it was bravery, but now that you mention it..."
"Yeah," Nick confirmed, scratching the back of his neck as he put down the lighter and immediately relit it. "From downtown to here, and then the first time he went to get Travis. He moved with brutal efficiency. He didn't hesitate. Like he had practiced this."
Despite their curiosity, neither of them wanted to pry further into Alex's behavior. After all, he was the man who had saved all their lives, the owner of this refuge of concrete and provisions, a makeshift sanctuary against the hell outside.
The conversation, uncomfortable on its own terms, then drifted to the only safe topic: the nightmare of the last few hours.
"Those subjects..." Alicia said, shuddering. "I only saw our neighbor acting weird. We tried to get her away like Alex said, but it didn't matter what we did. She wanted to bite, scratch... Nick followed Alex's advice and smashed her head."
"It was worse downtown," Nick interjected, his eyes fixed on nothing. "I saw a lot of people run, but then the infected people... zombies, as Alex called them, were blindly attacking anyone who moved. It looked like the rage was spreading mouth-to-mouth. When we came back with Travis and Daniel's family, we saw many more cases. Direct attacks. People had no idea how to defend themselves."
Daniel, the Mexican man who had been sitting in the corner, motionless and staring out the window, moved slightly. His wife, wounded, was in her own room, with their daughter accompanying her. Daniel was an older man, about sixty, with a dignity marked by the wrinkles of life.
"I saw them too," he murmured, his voice heavy with a deep accent. "When we were fleeing downtown, one of those subjects came close to my wife, Isabel, and that young man, Alex, threw himself onto the subject and, with a knife, struck his head without hesitation. He told me it was to protect my wife from the bite... He already knew what would happen to her if she had been bitten."
Joel, Sarah's father, whose face expressed the exhaustion of having sustained worry for hours, nodded.
"The chaos wasn't just them. It was the protesters too, you know?" he began to recount. "And the looting. We had to take the north road, and it was infested with people stealing, fighting. Then when we tried to escape by car, we had an accident. We escaped on foot, and when we thought we were safe, we ran into a soldier."
Silence fell. Gerry straightened up. This was the detail he was looking for.
"A soldier, what did he do?" Gerry asked, his voice suddenly professional.
"He stopped us. He had his rifle pointed. He said he had orders from his superiors to secure the perimeter and that we had to turn back or he would use lethal force. He didn't care that my daughter Sarah was bleeding from an accident. He was about to pull the trigger when Alex jumped in to help us."
"And what did Alex do?" Daniel asked.
"Alex talked to him. I don't know what he said, but the soldier froze, got nervous. The soldier looked at us and then left. He let us go."
Gerry felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature of the house. A law enforcement agent only draws a weapon against civilians in the most extreme and chaotic circumstances. A soldier only threatens to shoot a family under direct orders—orders that would only be given if control had completely collapsed. If the army was reaching that level of desperation—shooting at will—the central command must be completely broken.
His instinct as a former UN agent shrieked: The security system has failed. We are alone.
Taking a long, shaky breath, Gerry realized the time for anecdotes was over. They needed to focus on the immediate future.
"All right," Gerry said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Here's what we know: people are going crazy because of a virus. It's killing those people, and the military is acting in self-defense, which means there will be no help."
He looked at each of them, seeking a response.
"What do we do from now on? What are your plans for tomorrow?"
The question forced everyone to stop dwelling on the chaotic past and confront the morning. There was a thick silence.
Joel broke the silence with a voice that revealed his deep concern.
"Sarah... my daughter. She needs a hospital, Gerry. Elizabeth, Travis's ex-wife, did an incredible job with the wound on her leg, but it's a deep wound. I need a real doctor to see her, in an emergency room... I planned on going tomorrow morning."
Gerry nodded slowly, processing Joel's paternal logic.
"Joel, you're right to want to go. But think about this: how likely is it that a hospital in the city, in the middle of this chaos, and knowing the army was about to shoot in the streets, is operational?"
Gerry crossed his arms.
"If the hospital is still open, it's a trap," he continued. "It will be full of people who have been bitten, infiltrated zombies, or, worse, desperate people looting and taking advantage of the chaos. Alex told us the army had gone to the hospitals. If there's no military control, there's risk."
Joel's face contorted with understanding.
Daniel, who had remained silent, gave a dry nod. He, too, had considered going to a hospital for Isabel, his wife. He had even thought about the route to the border.
"Hospitals... they are a danger, yes," Daniel said hoarsely. "I was also planning to leave, maybe get away from the city. But my wife is wounded. And here, I have food and a steel roof. As for my house downtown..." A bitter smile crossed his face. "By now, the protesters and those... zombies must have looted it to the foundation. This house is safer. I'll stay until Isabel recovers."
Alicia and Nick looked at each other. The idea of returning to their home was unthinkable.
"Our house is in a compromised neighborhood, near where everything turned ugly," Alicia said with resignation. "Our neighborhood must be crawling."
Nick let out a bitter laugh.
"Sure, and Travis will surely want to go with the military because it's the 'right thing to do.' As if they're going to save anything... We have nowhere to go."
The understanding was tacit. In just a few hours, they had gone from seeking their previous lives to accepting that Alex, a stranger, was their only hope. Joel, seeing that the risk outweighed any possible medical benefit, gave up. It was smarter to wait for Sarah's recovery here.
Gerry, sensing the group's unity in their despair, saw his opportunity to establish the order his experience demanded. He straightened up, his tone shifting slightly to an authoritative, calm one—the tone he had used a thousand times to coordinate logistics in risk zones.
"All right. This is the reality: we are here, in a safe house. We need organization so we don't waste the opportunity Alex has given us. Especially since we don't know how things will end."
He began to establish roles, pointing at each person.
"First, surveillance; we'll establish five-hour shifts. Tommy, you start at the second-floor window. Joel, you follow, and then me. The young ones, Alicia and Nick, will help with logistics and relief tomorrow."
"Second, rationing; no waste. Alex has supplies, but we don't know how long this will last. We'll eat only the essentials."
"Third, resources; the house has extra power and potable water. However, as long as the city still has service, we will use normal electric light and running water. Only that way will we conserve Alex's extra supplies for when the grid collapses."
"And finally," Gerry paused, looking each of them in the eye. "The zombies. Alex told us; the only thing that stops them surely is the head. No shots to the chest, no containment attempts. The head is the weak point. If any of you see one, you ignore it or you eliminate it that way. This is not a movie; it is a fact."
Everyone nodded, relieved to have a plan, even a rudimentary one. Finally, they felt less adrift.
Alicia, the youngest but the most observant, approached Gerry with the radio in her hand.
"Gerry," she said, her voice turning sweet and full of an affectionate concern. "If you manage to contact Alex... can you tell him to let us know? Just to know he's okay. And to know if... if he needs anything."
Gerry noticed the young woman's genuine worry; an affection forged in shared trauma. He nodded, feeling the weight of that promise.
"I will, Alicia. Now, rest... Tommy, to your post."
Time dragged on, measured only by the creaking of the floorboards and the shallow breathing of those trying to sleep.
The next day, November 21st.
Gerry took his surveillance shift at dawn. The faint light of a Saturday morning that should have been normal began to creep in through the reinforced windows.
Around 6 a.m., Gerry found Alicia awake, watching the window. Her face was tense.
"Any news?" she asked in a whisper, looking at his face.
"I spoke to him in the early hours," Gerry said, doubt painted on his face. "He's fine. The person he went to rescue is also fine, but downtown is very complicated. He said it will take him a few days to get out of where they are."
Alicia's look of relief mixed with a new concern.
"Days?"
"Yes. But he told me something else," Gerry hesitated, knowing what he was about to say would put an end to any hope that this was a local problem. "Check your phone. Look at the news."
Alicia turned on the screen, her face illuminated by the blue light. At first, she only saw local headlines about the curfew. Then, she scrolled. She saw images of neighboring cities, then other regions, and finally, switching the news source, she saw reports from NY, Paris, London, Seoul. They weren't protests, they weren't civil unrest. It was the same chaos, the same people attacking, the same panic.
Alicia lowered the phone, her hand trembling.
"This... isn't just our city."
"No," Gerry said, his voice grave. "It's not just the country. What Alex has been saying, what we've been living through, went global overnight."
The ugly, vast truth had revealed itself. The situation he had momentarily thought would be resolved soon had only worsened, and now the entire world was burning.
.
----
.
[A/N: CHAPTER COMPLETED
Hello everyone.
First, I want to apologize for this long wait, and also thank those who supported the novel even with this delay.
I had some family issues, and I wanted to let you know, but it seemed irresponsible to announce a return date I wasn't sure about.
Back to the novel.
Long chapter, from Gerry's perspective.
As a reminder, Gerry is the character from WWZ, but in this universe.
This chapter is written to remind those characters who were with Alex during the first hours of chaos and who witnessed his transformation. Something I've hinted at in the last few chapters, but that no one would really be able to identify except David, but the two haven't met yet.
Another reminder: the rest of the characters are from The Last of Us and Fear the Walking Dead.
----
Read my other novels
#Vinland Kingdom: Race Against Time (Chapter 122)
#The Walking Dead: Emily's Metamorphosis (Chapter 33) (INTERMITTENT)
#The Walking Dead: Patient 0 - Lyra File (Chapter 12) (INTERMITTENT)
You can find them on my profile.]